In: Computer Science
JAVA Wordladder Project
stone
Atone
aLone
Clone
clonS
cOons
coNns
conEs
coneY
Money
Word ladders were invented by Lewis Carroll in 1878, the author of Alice in Wonderland. A ladder is a sequence of words that starts at the starting word, ends at the ending word, In a word ladder puzzle you have to change one word into another by altering a single letter at each step. Each word in the ladder must be a valid English word and must have the same length. For example, to turn stone into money, one possible ladder is given on the left.
Many ladder puzzles have more than one possible solution. Your program must determine the shortest word ladder. Another path from stone to money is
stone store shore chore choke choky cooky cooey coney money
Objectives
Practice implementing and using a Queue data structure.
Gain an understanding of the algorithms used for efficient implementation.
Practice working in small teams to solve problems, design algorithms and write code
Instructions
Your program will accept starting and ending words from the input file called "infile.txt". Then, you read the dictionary file called “dictionary.txt '' store all words in a LinkedList. Finally, you build a word ladder between starting and ending words
There are several ways to solve this problem. One simple method involves using stacks and queues. The algorithm (that you must implement) works as it follows
Get the starting word and search through the dictionary to find all words that are one letter different. Create stacks for each of these words, containing the starting word (pushed first) and the word that is one letter different. Enqueue each of these stacks into a queue. This will create a queue of stacks! Then dequeue the first item (which is a stack) from the queue, look at its top word and compare it with the ending word. If they equal, you are done - this stack contains the ladder. Otherwise, you find all the words one letter different from it. For each of these new words create a deep copy of the stack and push each word onto the stack. Then enqueue those stacks to the queue. And so on. You terminate the process when you reach the ending word or the queue is empty.
You have to keep track of used words! Otherwise, an infinite loop occurs.
Example
The starting word is smart. Find all the words one letter different from smart, push them into different stacks and store stacks in the queue. This table represents a queue of stacks.
----------------------------------------------------
| scart | start | swart | smalt | smarm |
| smart | smart | smart | smart | smart |
----------------------------------------------------
Now dequeue the front and find all words one letter different from the top word scart. This will spawn seven stacks:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| scant | scatt | scare | scarf | scarp | scars | scary |
| scart | scart | scart | scart | scart | scart | scart |
| smart | smart | smart | smart | smart | smart | smart
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------
which we enqueue to the queue. The queue size now is 11. Again dequeue the front and find all words one letter different from the top word start. This will spawn four stacks:
----------------------------------------
| sturt | stare | stark | stars |
| start | start | start | start |
| smart | smart | smart | smart |
----------------------------------------
Add them to the queue. The queue size now is 14. Repeat the procedure until either you find the ending word or such a word ladder does not exist. Make sure you do not run into an infinite loop!
Queue
You are to implement a Queue data structure based on Java’s Queue class using LinkedList.
Stack
You are to use Java's Stack class.
Dictionary
You read the dictionary file which has the contents at the bottom of this page "dictionary.txt"
The dictionary file contains exactly one word per line. The number of lines in the dictionary is not specified.
Output
Your program must output to the console one word ladder from the start word to the end word. Every word in the ladder must be a word that appears in the dictionary. This includes the given start and end words--if they are not in the dictionary, you should print "There is no word ladder between ..." Remember that there may be more than one ladder between the start word and the end word. Your program may output any one of these ladders. The first output word must be the start word and the last output word must be the end word. If there is no way to make a ladder from the start word to the end word, your program must output "There is no word ladder between ..."
For testing purposes, I provide you with the input file and the expected output.
SAMPLE OUTPUT
[line, fine]
[dear, fear]
There is no word ladder between stone and money
[fake, lake, lase, last, cast, cost, coat]
[like, line, fine, fire, fore, core, cord, cold, hold, held, help]
There is no word ladder between blue and pink
[face, fake, lake, like]
[help, held, hold, cold, cord, core, fore, fire, fine, find, mind]
[lice, line, fine, fire, fore, core, cord, cold, hold, held, help]
There is no word ladder between door and lice
Starter Code:
WordLadder.java
import java.util.*; import java.io.*; public class WordLadder { private static LinkedList dict; private static LinkedList visited; private static String start, end; public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException{ // TODO Auto-generated method stub File dictfile = new File("dictionary.txt"); File infile = new File("infile.txt"); dict = new LinkedList<>(); // load the dictionary try( Scanner in = new Scanner(dictfile);){ while(in.hasNext()) { dict.add(in.next()); } } try(Scanner in = new Scanner(infile);) { while(in.hasNext()) { start = in.next(); end = in.next(); if(start.length()!=end.length() || !dict.contains(start) || !dict.contains(end) ){ System.out.println("There is no word ladder between "+start+ " and "+end); continue; } findLadder(start,end); } } } public static void findLadder(String start,String end) { Queue> queue = new LinkedList<>(); visited = new LinkedList<>(); Stack copiedStack = new Stack<>(); // Left as exercise } public static boolean isAnEdge(String w1, String w2) { // Left as exercise } }
lice deck cord bent band cast bike cash card boat cold coat dear slow core dash cost dame fish dorm dine deer dear dime fast blue deme dive dish dinn door dome fake slow pink face find fast fire fear fine finn help held hash fore folk fold hard hear here host hold hire lase land knot lake kunn kuns last mind main line lime like lost live linn love lunn mike maze mash make mice meta mien milk vice silk neck mink mine must most more nash sick nice rain pour pine nick pain nine nuns pond pony poor sake rick rash rime rust sane sand sine sure sony tiny warm vide ward worm
line fine dear fear stone money fake coat like help blue pink face like help mind lice help door lice
PLEASE GIVE IT A THUMBS UP, I SERIOUSLY NEED ONE, IF YOU NEED ANY MODIFICATION THEN LET ME KNOW, I WILL DO IT FOR YOU
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--------------QueueInterface.java--------------
---------------------------------------------------------
public interface QueueInterface<E> {
/**
* Tests if the queue is logically empty
*/
public boolean isEmpty();
/**
* Puts a value into the back of the queue.
*
*
* @param value the item to insert.
* @return true if successful
* @throws ClassCastException
*/
public boolean enqueue (E value);
/**
* Returns the first element in the queue.
*
* @return element at front of the queue
* @throws java.util.NoSuchElementException if the queue is empty.
*/
public E peek() throws java.util.NoSuchElementException;
/**
* Returns and removes the front element of the queue. It works with wraparound.
*
* @return element at front of the queue
* @throws java.util.NoSuchElementException if the queue is empty.
*/
public E dequeue() throws java.util.NoSuchElementException;
/**
* Makes the queue physically empty.
*/
public void clear();
}
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------Queue.java-------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
import java.util.*;
public class Queue<E> implements QueueInterface<E>{
private Stack<E> inbox;
private Stack<E> outbox;
public Queue(){
inbox = new Stack<E>();
outbox = new Stack<E>();
}
public boolean enqueue(E e){
try{
inbox.push(e);
} catch (ClassCastException ex) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
public E dequeue(){
try{
if(outbox.isEmpty()){
while(!inbox.isEmpty()){
outbox.push(inbox.pop());
}
}
}catch(NoSuchElementException ex){}
return (E)outbox.pop();
}
public E peek(){
try{
if(outbox.isEmpty()){
while(!inbox.isEmpty())
outbox.push(inbox.pop());
}
}catch(NoSuchElementException ex){}
return (E)outbox.pop();
}
public boolean isEmpty(){
return (inbox.isEmpty() && outbox.isEmpty());
}
public void clear(){
// Implementation left as exercise
}
}
---------------------------------------------------------
-----------------MainDriver.java------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class MainDriver {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
// TODO code application logic here
Ladder wordLadder = null; new Ladder();
Scanner in=null;
try{
in = new Scanner(new File("input.txt"));
while (in.hasNext()){
// Build word ladders for the given input and print them
String start = in.next();
String end = in.next();
wordLadder = new Ladder();
Stack ladder = wordLadder.buildLadder(start, end);
if (ladder.isEmpty())
System.out.println("There is no word ladder between " + start + " and " + end + "!");
else
System.out.println(ladder);
}
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e){
System.out.println("Wrong file name!");
System.exit(0);
}
in.close();
}
}
---------------------------------------------------------
-------------------Ladder.java---------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
public class Ladder {
private Set<String> dictionary;
private Set used;
private Queue wordLadder;
/**
* Constructor.
* Initialize private data fields
*/
public Ladder()throws IOException{
dictionary = new HashSet<String>();
wordLadder = new Queue<>();
used = new HashSet<>();
readDictionary("dictionary.txt");
}
/**
* Reads the dictionary and store it in the hash table
*/
public void readDictionary(String urlString) throws IOException{
FileInputStream dataStream = new FileInputStream(urlString);
Scanner fileIn = new Scanner(dataStream);
String word;
while(fileIn.hasNextLine()){
word = fileIn.nextLine();
dictionary.add(word);
}
}
public Stack buildLadder(String start, String end){
Stack ladder = new Stack<>();
Queue q = new Queue<>();
Stack temp = new Stack<>();
temp.push(start);
q.enqueue(temp);
dictionary.remove(start);
while(!q.isEmpty()){
temp = (Stack)q.dequeue();
String last = (String)temp.peek();
// System.out.println(temp);
Iterator<String> iter = dictionary.iterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
String s = iter.next();
if (isAnEdge(last,s)) {
// System.out.println(last);
// System.out.println(s);
Stack stack2 = (Stack)temp.clone();
stack2.push(s);
iter.remove();
q.enqueue(stack2);
if(s.equals(end)){
ladder = stack2;
return ladder;
}
}
}
}
return ladder;
}
private boolean isAnEdge(String w1, String w2) {
if(w1.length()!=w2.length()) return false;
int numdiff = 0;
for(int i=0;i<w1.length();i++){
if(w1.charAt(i)!=w2.charAt(i)) numdiff++;
if(numdiff>1) break;
}
return numdiff==1;
}
}